Ciudad Barranquilla

The Pleasurama District of the city, with larger towers in the distance

Ciudad Barranquilla is the major megacity of South-Am.

It is notorious as one of the most corrupt megacities on the Earth, with a derogatory nickname of "Banana City" - as a result, the Barranquilla Judges enjoy whenever they get one over on "El Norte".

The city is located in what was Argentina, roughly on the sprawl around Buenos Aires.

Description

The great hills where judicial lux-habs are sited

La Cuidadela del Desaparecido, the face of the Judges for the people (note the Judge statues)

Poverty is extreme in the city, especially in the vast barrio sectors, and there are few ways out of it but crime. The powerful narco-gang cartels recruit out of the barrios. Healthcare is privatised and the prices high.

There are still pockets of wealth belonging to (non-Judge) private enterprise. All of this private wealth exists under license from Justice Department - just as the cartels do. During a Mega-City One goodwill mission to the city, a wealthy man cheerfully told Judge Rymes that there was nothing you couldn't get away with in Barranquilla if you had money and even admitted to murders. Many of the wealthy live on the big hill overlooking the city, Sierra dos Lobos ("Mountain of Wolves"), where they can literally look down on the poor. The Judges live up on this hill, side-by-side with the allowed narco-cartels and their families.

For all of Mega-City One's contempt for Barranquilla, it does a lot of trade with it. One example is that a vast amount of the city's treemeat is exported to Mega-City One while the locals go hungry. Justice Department chafes under this, seeing Mega-City One as a plunderer who sneer down their nose at them (which MC-1 does).

History

Formation to 2127

In the 1980s, the experimental GGS pesticide caused Brazilian ants to mutate into giant, intelligent forms that rampaged down from Brazil into Argentina. Brazil's Captain Villa, pursuing the ants, ran into rebel guerillas in the mountains and convinced them to assist, only for them to be wiped out. Eventually, a pan-American military summit including Argentine officers was formed to win these "Ant Wars". They were believed wiped out and the event somehow hushed up. However, a few survivors went underground, while a retest of GGS would accidentally create giant mosquitos called Los Zancudos.

The slums of "Banana City"

After the Atomic Wars, all that remained of Argentina was Ciudad Barranquilla and the Judges took over. There was little pretence of law enforcement, with the Judges being a brutal elite that owned businesses and property, lived in nice apartments above the slums, and ran the city for profit. The narco-gang cartels were allowed to operate under license, and recruited their soldiers from the poverty-stricken barrios. The city would remain unaware that Los Zancudos were enslaving humans as workers and food (and places to lay their eggs) in the nearby Peruvian jungles.

Mega-City One would become a dominant neighbour of the megacity, just as the United States had been before it, and looked down on the place as corrupt, poor, and primitive. It was already sneered at as "Banana City" by 2080, much to the irritation of the local Judges, and ran a series of undercover operatives to allow them to carry out judicial operations without permission.

Judge McBridge of Mega-City One said that Barranquilla made even the Andean Conglom look functional - this in 2111, not long after the notorious purges in the Andes. Judge Supremo Batista was in power at this point and dressed in an ornate metal eagle costume.

Murphyville's flyover bridge to the Atlantic Tunnel advertised a direct connection to Ciudad Barranquilla alongside Brit-Cit, Atlantis, and Mega-City One.

Hotel Supremo and the upmarket bit for tourists, circa the mid-2120s

The psychotic Judge Barry Kurten fled down to Ciudad Barranquilla to avoid being arrested for murder and took a job with the CB force as "Diablo". Barbara Hershey and McBride visited the city in 2111 to request his extradition, which Judge Supremo Batista refused. To rub in his contempt, he made them wait and watch an "appeals session", and made it clear he felt the citizens of Mega-City One weren't any happier under the 'superior' Yank Judges than his own were. Unknown to Batista, Dredd was carrying out an undercover rendition in disguise as a Barranquilla Judge, and he located and killed Kurten.

During Judgement Day, the city was badly hit by zombie hordes and begged Mega-City One for aid. Unlike its neighbours South-Am City and Brasilia, it survived. Judge Corzo joined a pan-judicial strike on Sabbat but would betray the rest of the team in a futile attempt to save himself.

Ciudad Barranquilla hid a missile silo in Machu Picchu but abandoned it after Judgement Day. In the aftermath, Los Zancudos took over the area and built their city of Zancudo Picchu.

InterDep was running dirty-tricks operations in Barranquilla in 2117, a sign they were violating their remit.

PJ Maybe fled to Ciudad Barranquilla, faked his death, and established a fake identity as the wealthy businessman "Pedro Juliet Montez" with the help of some bribed Judges.

The Herod entity rampaged through the city in 2121, killing people it identified using zodiacal readings.

Judge Kortez attempted to overthrow the Judge Supremo, failed, and fled Barranquilla in a H-wagon with a chunk of the city's bullion reserves. He crashed near the ruins of Teotihuacan. Consumed with mania, he believed he was the god Tezcatlipoca and named the ruins Mictlan, after the Aztec land of the dead, and turned it into a brutal refuge for outlaws. Saul Cain, the "Missionary Man", overthrew Kortez in 2124, his plan involving alerting Barranquilla to the lost h-wagon - they blitzed the city and took out Kortez's loyalists, allowing Cain to consolidate power. The Judges agreed to take the gold and leave Cain in charge.

Former Euro-City Judge Lasalle entered the city as an observer for the Peace Rangers in 2125. Her job was a grim slog of collected the names of 'disappeared' citizens and lobbying an uncaring Justice Department.

Judge Sofia Perez on ant-back, cropped from Megazine cover

In 2127, Los Zancudos and their human slaves were dying out from a blight, and their lapsed rule meant some of their slaves had turned to the increasingly intelligent giant ants for help. A war had broken out in the jungles when Ciudad Barranquilla Judges Xavi Ancizar and Sofia Perez, secret lovers, crashed while transporting supplies and psi convict Fendito "the Bandito" to the prison La Paz. The ants became aware they could help destroy their enemy while the mosquitos found, thanks to Fendito's treachery, that Barranquilla medical supplies would cure the blight. Judge Perez, wanting to save Xavi, agreed to lead an ant assault on Zancudo Picchu and in the end, was forced to sacrifice herself triggering a nuclear explosion at the old silo. Ciudad Barranquilla remained completely unaware of events, only seeing this as a curious blip on a seismic scanner, while the ants prepared to retake power.

When Dredd became aware Maybe was still alive in 2127, he went to Baranquilla under cover of guarding several ambassadors on a goodwill mission. Maybe was prepared for this and murdered four of the ambassadors to taunt Dredd. Humiliated by the first few deaths, Barranquilla badges allowed Dredd's team to officially investigate and have the power to detain suspects, and took pleasure in pointing out when he failed. When Dredd did undercover Maybe's identity, he launched a raid on the killer's mansion without informing Barranquilla - forcing Dredd to leave, being unable to discover that Maybe faked his death again. Maybe moved back to Mega-City One, though he retained contacts in the Barranquilla underworld.

The second depicted leader of CB

At a reception for the mission, the current Supreme Judge (whose hotel the mission was staying in) met Dredd - this time a man in ornate formal wear, but equally disgruntled with the city's relationship to Mega-City One, saying they were looked down on as "corrupt, ignorant peasants" while MC-1 "honour[s] us by stealing our produce and paying us with trinkets".

Shortly after this, in an appeals case for Kenny Who?, Public Defender 314 asked about whether judicial anti-defamation laws applied to foreign Judges like those of Ciudad Barranquilla. Dredd stated "they're not Judges -- they're gangsters in uniform", his views unwittingly allowing 314 to win the case by arguing that if the laws only applied to MC-1 Judges, Who? couldn't be charged as he hadn't drawn any (i.e. had drawn them very inaccurately).

Regime change

The city during the Sangrenegra conflict

Santiago Sangrenegra became Supreme Justice in the summer of 2127 and was brutal enough to spark expat protests in Mega-City One. He became an ally of the Sino Block, who wanted a satellite state in South-Am.

However, he failed to properly put down internal resistance like most takeovers and Judge Contranista, the deposed head of internal security, set up a rebel force of Judges. Judge-on-Judge conflict and civilian uprisings broke out across the city, escalating in conflict to the point where two hundred thousand had died and a multifactional civil war, possibly the city collapsing completely, was plausible in mid-2128. The Sinos prepared to step in militarily to save him. Meanwhile East-Meg Two were secretly backing the Contranistas and plotted to replace Sangrenegra with his illegitimate son Cholo, who served as the head of his father's bodyguard force and bagman to the narto-cartels. Hershey, now Chief Judge, decided to stabilise the city and install a client Judge Supremo under guise of humanitarian action, hoping to prevent a Sino or Sov ally in the region.

A multinational alliance of primarily Street Judges established safe zones in Barranquilla, obliterating any local Judges that put up resistance and knocking out the la Cuidadela del Desaparecido detention centre. Officially, the fighting between rival Judges and the narco-gangs was allowed; unofficially and without telling their allies, Mega-City One searched for any corpses of their citizens in the notorious el Huerto dos Huesos mass grave. A Sino-Cit military force almost intervened but was warned off, while East-Meg Two's Judge Vyacheslav Kolsin was sent as an 'observer' in order to assist the coup. While Sangrenegra officially complied, he had the narco-gang cartels arm and outfit insurgents in the barrios to kill invaders. Dredd dealt with this by bombing the Orejuelas Cartel's compound on Sierra dos Lobos (killing the cartel's families and children in the process) as a message, which intentionally ended cartel support for Sangrenegra and left him vulnerable to a strike.

Once fourteen Big Meg corpses had been found, Judge Dredd used this as the excuse to 'arrest' and 'lawfully execute' the weakened Sangrenegra - striking before the Sov-backed Contranistas could move in. Cholo was given a better offer and put in charge as the MC-1 client ruler, but Dredd left him a violent reminder that they could depose him too. Chief Justice Cholo agreed to allow foreign peacekeepers, set up a truth commission to investigate regime crimes, and several reforms to 'justify' the public reason for MC-1's involvement.

Medics visit the barrios in 2130

Citizen Chavez was forced to agree to sex work to pay off medical debts for her sister in 2130 - a deal arranged by the on-call doctor, as the only way he'd agree to work for the Chavez's and their low credit.

In 2133, Maybe would call in his CB contacts Don Emilio Lopez Hidalgo to escape the cubes.

In the aftermath of Chaos Day, Hershey would refer to Cholo as an example of the unpleasant figures she had to negotiate with for realpolitik.

Judge Mineiro was an ally of gang boss Correia until 2135 but turned her in after she callously gunned down a civilian child during a gang hit.

The streets around Mundial's HQ

In 2138, Mega-City reporter Max Blixen fled to Ciudad Barranquilla - which still had no extradition treaty - in order to blow the whistle on the city's new mass surveillance group, Section 7. Here, he was helped by friendly ties to the owner of Mundial Vidcom, a powerful media conglomerate with affiliate channels all over the world. The local Judges quite enjoyed rubbing his humiliation in Dredd's face, much to his distaste. While Blixen hoped to be safe in Barranquilla, which had no extradition treaty with his home city, Blixen was later killed in a robbery - implied to be a murder MC-1 had arranged.

A reference was made by a Judge to "the old ones" when expelling Mineiro from the city, presumably meaning the giant ants.

Downtown CB, after the destruction of a sector house

A Justice Department Block was disintegrated in 2140 and four people - Correia, Judge Mineiro, Chavez, and murderous archaeologist Barrancourt - who died in the same second returned to life. These "Returners" were press-ganged into investigating the issue and found they were the only ones able to see the vast Incan pyramid that now existed in the crater. What Justice Department and the rest of the Returners didn't know was that Barrancourt had caused this, sacrificing a woman (Chavez's sister) to summon the Incan goddess Ixhab and become immortal. What he actually achieved was Ixhab, incarnate through the woman he'd sacrificed, was cursing him and the others to be immortal but not invulnerable, so they would inevitably decay but remain aware & in pain forever.

Afterwards, the Returners had their promised pardons were reversed for one more mission under orders from Cholo himself. They were then brainwashed with subliminal messaging to make them more controllable (it failed to take with Chavez) and dropped into the Mongolian Free Zone to find a crashed Sino-Cit transporter with the Sino Chief Judge's niece on board.

Supreme Justice Cholo in 2141, monitoring a situation

It turned out there was no Sino-Cit crash or request for the Returners, the entire thing set up by the malevolent psi Kuu Burkhany in the ruins of Chandhu theme park, and Cholo ordered everyone exterminated to stop Kuu escaping - and on grounds that "the city's better off without those freaks". (Judge Hernandez instead allowed them to take a h-wagon and escape)

The Barranquilla cartels and the rulers of Comuna 13 were involved with each other until 2142, when a sickly Barbara Hershey - in a mission to remove Judge Smiley's agents from the board - took the latter out.

In the 2140s, a death belt (called an avalancha pausada, "delayed avalanche", down south) had formed in the skies above rural Ciudad Barranquilla. A colony of fugitives would set up shop in the flying rocks out of sight of any Judges. In 2143, Barranquilla allowed a Mega-City One group including Dredd to pursue a criminal there, with local Judge Fuertez along (who was annoyed they were overriding CB jurisdiction).

The year 2143 would also see Hershey return to Barranquilla as part of her mission. Her cover was that Dirty Frank was a boxer and she was his manager, playing on the cartel's love of the sport in order to get close to cartel boss and Smiley cat's paw Edu. She started out in bouts in the city outskirts, forced low-level mobster Juninho to assist her, and used the cover of a fight in the Ciudad Barranquilla City Tournament to launch a hostile takeover on the building.

Barranquilla was the chair of an Assembly of Nations inquiry into Mega-City One's Project Providence at the end of 2143. The city was considered a close ally of MC-1 and unlikely to rule in favour of punitive measures, causing Sino-Cit to state they'd call for sanctions at next month's meeting.

Judges

"If you are so much better, why do your people still hate you?"

—Supreme Judge to Dredd, Megazine #231

Dredd undercover as a CB Judge (Simpson's original colours), cover of When Judges Go Bad trade

Rear view of Barranquilla Judge, on 2143 equivalent of Lawmaster.

The Judges are notorious for being brazenly corrupt, with often little pretence at law - they are functionally just the biggest gang. Judge Supremos own vast amounts of property and use their badges to collect rent. Violent coups & small civil wars for power were not unknown.

Only those born into the Judging classes or with riches to buy in can become a Judge. It is strictly an elite profession and many of them live in swanky hab-units up on a hill, literally above the masses. While Judges are clearly encouraged to have liaisons to create a Judging class, they are not completely free: some Judges need to sneak around or pay bribes to have the relationships they actually want.

Ciudad Barranquilla iso-cubes are notoriously harsh but citizens can make an appeal to the Judge Supremo i.e. pay a hefty sum to get years of their sentence or a loved one's sentence.

Those who crossed the Judges could be taken to the notorious la Cuidadela del Desaparecido, an interrogation centre, and a vast burial ground, El Huerto dos Huesos ("the Bone Orchard"), existed openly as a terror tactic to remind the citizens to be compliant. Both sites were implied to be shut down after the 2128 invasion.

He even has a moustache to twirl

Despite all of this, the Barranquilla badges loathe the judgement from "El Norte", arguing the people of the 'sophisticated' cities are still miserable and loathe their Judges.

Comuna 13's ruling gang wore surplus Barranquilla uniforms.

As with Mega-City One, the Judges take a Long Walk though the "Long Walk Boulevard" (City Gate 35) is reserved for Judges who've crossed a line and are being expelled from the city.

Mongoose RPG

In the early 2000s Dredd RPG from Moongoose, extra details were invented for Barranquilla:

• This was the first Judge dictatorship and predates the Atomic Wars, as the Juez's deposed the Barranquilla Federal Government years before "Bad Bob" Booth came to power. Anyone can bribe their way into being a Juez.

• Their Lawmaster equivalents are called ciclón bikes (cyclone), their Lawgiver equivalents pistola rata (rat guns), and daysticks are porra dolor (pain sticks)

• You can bribe your way out of the iso-cubes. If you don't have the cash, and most citizens don't, you're highly unlikely to ever leave the iso-cubes, a hellhole of crazed inmates and debauched wardens.

• Their allies are the Pan-Andes Conurb, Ciudad Espana, Simba City, Sino-City Two, and a South African settlement called "Chowderville"

Trivia

The map that put CB in its place

• Comic strips sent in Ciudad Barranquilla have traditionally given the characters extremely stereotyped, borderline racist accents - even if they're talking to each other and not 'in English'! (This was lampooned in Zancudo! where Fendito "the Bandito" is said to be faking his accent)

• Barranquilla is a real city in Colombia. The name derives from "barranca", the Spanish for "canyon" or "ravine". This doesn't really make sense for Argentina but in its first story, it was only vaguely located in South America; it was a map in prog 701 that placed in Argentina rather than Colombia, presumably because Arthur Ransom didn't realise this was refering to a real place. "Regime Change" would have a location called Sierra dos Lobos - there's a Sierra de Lobos but in Mexico.

Dredd undercover, in bronze-colour uniform.

• While Will Simpson's design for the Judges has remained constant, their colours are rarely the same from story to story. They started with various bright colours on their helmets & trousers with standard blackshirts and white shoulder pads; then, briefly, they had MC-1's blue and yellow; in several stories, due to Carlos Ezquerra's colouring, they've had a subdued bronze-and-black; and Nicolo Assirelli uses the multicoloured uniforms but more subdued than Simpson.